Promoting Well Being

Directorate Background

The Directorate of Children and Young People’s Services is managed by Mr Brian Dornan and is responsible for: 

·          Corporate Parenting

·          Family Support and Safeguarding

·          Specialist Child Health and Disability

The Directorate also has the lead responsibility for Social Work and Social Care Governance within the organisation.

Corporate Parenting

This Division is responsible for the delivery of services to Looked After Children and Young People. The Division aims to provide the best possible care, where possible in secure family placements by:

·          Achieving permanence, through family placements and adoption, where that is appropriate.

·          Increasing the numbers of foster homes, including kinship placements and specialist foster care.

·          Through the development of community services and foster care reducing the number of children living in children’s homes allowing the Trust to close one Children’s Home in 2010. 

·          Developing enhanced therapeutic models of care in our children’s homes.

·          Through the development of leaving and after care services and greater partnership working with voluntary and statutory partners to ensure that young people who are leaving care are successfully prepared for adulthood and independent living.

Family Support and Safeguarding

This Division is responsible for the delivery of services to Children and Young People in Need or Requiring Safeguarding. The Division provides a range of targeted health and social care programmes, and aims to improve these by:

·          Developing the range of family support and early years services

·          Empowering families through family group conferences.

·          With partner agencies improve services to young people and their families, reducing the risk of family breakdown.

·          Developing Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

·          Securing services provided by our voluntary sector by putting in place secure long term funding arrangements.

·          Improving systems, processes and practice through the Regional Reform Programme.

·          Taking a lead role in implementing new safeguarding arrangements.

·          Developing the out of hours social work service

Specialist Child Health and Disability

This Division is responsible for the delivery of services to Children and Young People with Complex Needs and Disabilities. The Division aims to improve services by:

·          Reducing the time for specialist assessment and treatment services.

·          Developing person centred approaches

·          Extending the children’s community nursing service to a 7-day service.

·          Developing autism services for children and adults.

·          Developing our Paediatric and Neo-natal services across Craigavon and Daisy Hill Hospitals as a complementary network and increasing the number of neo-natal cots.

·          Opening a new children’s home in Newry - 2009.

·          Ensuring the smooth transitions for young people as they enter adulthood and access adult services.

Social Services Workforce Training and Development

The primary focus of the Social Services Training and Development Unit is to enhance the training, qualifications, skills and competence of the Social Care workforce in the Southern Health and Social Care Trust.

The Unit works in partnership with the commissioners and providers of social care services to identify and implement the training strategy for personal social services.  Part of this strategy is to provide training and development opportunities at vocational, qualifying and post-qualifying levels to enable staff to deliver high quality services to service users and their carers.  There is also a commitment to promote inter-agency and multi-disciplinary training were appropriate. 

Professional social work education is organised with an emphasis on practice experience and partnership with employers as well as academic rigor.  As a result core business of the Unit is in providing practice supervision, assessment, placement opportunities and direct teaching to students undertaking professional social work training in Northern Ireland.

The Personal Social Services Training Strategy 2006/2016 and emerging legislation, policy and procedures significantly influence training activity.  The strategy puts particular emphasis on targets for particular groups of staff.  This influences the provision of Inductions, Post Qualifying and C.P.D training events as well as the provision of support, mentoring and assessment services.

Social Services and Social Care Governance

The Governance team is responsible for supporting the Director to implement his responsibilities in relation to the Executive Director of Social Work function. This includes ensuring the Trust has systems and processes in place to discharge its delegated statutory functions in respect of childcare, mental health, disability and community care.

For copy of Baseline Report on Children and Young People's Report please click here

Please click here to see examples of PPI Projects in this Directorate